The Wave Begins
An hour after Seon-woo left, the firmly closed doors of the parlor swung open and Chief Choi stepped in.
His face had gone ash-gray.
"I have a report to make."
Kim Jong-soo did not pull his gaze away from the window, asking in a voice gone low and grave.
"Yes. Did you confirm it?"
"...I did. Kang Seon-woo was right. We've confirmed that Cho Hee-chul has been running around with Park Nam-gyu."
The muscle between Kim Jong-soo's brows twitched.
The scenario he had feared most had become reality.
"When we grabbed Park Nam-gyu and squeezed him, he talked freely. Apparently he and Cho Hee-chul had a bit of fun a while back with some wash trading, and they made a tidy profit off it. Couldn't forget the taste of it, so he poured even more of the money you lent him back in — and this time he's built an entire market-rigging operation around it."
"Hah."
Kim Jong-soo let out a hollow laugh, as if the audacity of it had winded him.
"Cho Hee-chul's character may be rotten, but all these years he did nothing but lend money and collect interest. A snake that kept its coils to itself suddenly wading into a scheme this dangerous — why?"
"That's the thing... it seems he took a personal bath on some stock options. Lost quite a lot."
"Lost money?"
"Yes, sir. It appears he allied himself with a manipulation ring in a reckless bid to recover the losses."
Kim Jong-soo clicked his tongue.
"Worthless bastard."
He loses his own money, his eyes roll back, and then he gambles with someone else's — mine, no less? So that uneasy feeling I'd had about Cho Hee-chul from the very beginning was right after all.
A man who chased only the profit in front of his nose. A creature whose vessel couldn't hold so much as a soy sauce dish.
But what angered Kim Jong-soo more than the betrayal itself was something else.
"So then."
Kim Jong-soo turned his head slowly and fixed Chief Choi with a stare.
"My money was rotting at the bottom of a sewer, and we knew nothing about it — nothing at all — until a complete stranger, some kid, told us to our faces?"
"...I apologize. Even with ten mouths, I have no excuse."
Chief Choi could not lift his head; he bent deep at the waist. Cold sweat poured down his spine like rain.
"It seems you'll have to tear your entire intelligence network down to the studs."
"I'll correct it at once. I'll put the boys to work immediately—"
"No."
Kim Jong-soo cut him off, ice in his voice.
"There's no need for you to do anything."
"...I beg your pardon?"
"Go to Cho Hee-chul and recover my principal — every last ten won of it, interest included. Not a single bill left behind. And tell him there will be no further dealings."
Kim Jong-soo's eyes glinted, frost-cold.
"Once you've handled that, you'll turn in your resignation."
"M-Mr. Chairman!"
"My eyes and ears went blind. Tell me — what reason is there for you to keep that chair? Give up the seat and go."
"......."
An eviction order cold as a killing frost.
Chief Choi bit his lip. There was no room for excuses. In a business where information was life itself, the sin of blindfolding one's master weighed heavier than any other.
"...I understand, sir. I will see my final duty through properly, and then I'll go."
Chief Choi bowed and withdrew.
Silence settled over the parlor once more.
Kim Jong-soo sank deep into the sofa and stared up at the ceiling.
And quite naturally, one man's face rose in his mind.
*Kang Seon-woo.*
From the very look in his eyes, he had been different from small fry like Cho Hee-chul.
That composure — unflinching even before him, bold enough to offer *him* advice.
*"Within the first half of this year, the political world is going to become very noisy."*
And that piece of information he'd tossed out as if it were nothing at all.
"So among the Sunjin family's third generation... there really is one genuine article."
The size of the vessel was simply different.
A premonition stirred in him — that for quite a long time to come, this might turn out to be a very interesting trade indeed.
Kim Jong-soo lifted the telephone from the table. He pressed a speed-dial button, and the call was answered on the first ring.
"It's me."
His instruction was brief.
"Prepare one clean parcel and bring it to me."
*I'll have it ready immediately, sir.*
As he hung up, a peculiar smile crept across Kim Jong-soo's lips.
"Let's just see whether this money earns its keep."
The next morning, a call came in from Jung Tae-sung.
*"Sir, the Bukchon funds have been fully processed."*
"Did they land in the paper company's account?"
*"Yes. The loan was drawn through the Ribbon Capital account."*
The man's work was as clean as ever.
He had used the Cayman Islands paper company originally created to establish SJ Holdings for this loan. After all, if ten billion won suddenly appeared in my personal account, the National Tax Service — and everyone under my own roof — would find it all too easy to notice. I wanted money that left no trace, and this was the best way to get it.
Besides, since I held one hundred percent of Ribbon Capital's shares, the money was as good as mine anyway.
I offered a brief thanks and immediately gave the next order.
"Oh, and one more thing, Director Jung. Run the intelligence-gathering lines for a while and look into Sunjin Aluminum's movements."
*"Sunjin... Aluminum, you said?"*
"Yes. In particular, whether they've had any contact with the Yeouido securities district, or whether anything is shifting inside the company itself."
Within the first half of the year, my granduncle Kang Byung-chul would make his move. He was certain to begin accumulating shares of Sunjin Sangsa and launch his attack. He would already be moving now, so I couldn't afford to miss even the smallest twitch.
"Even the most trivial movement will do. If anything looks off, report to me immediately."
*"Understood. I'll keep a careful watch."*
"Until next time, then."
The moment the call ended, a short alert tone rang out as if it had been waiting.
*Beep—*
[DEPOSIT] ₩10,000,000,000
(Bukchon Investment Consortium)
An army of zeroes filling the entire screen.
Ten billion won.
*Good. Now let's put this money to real work.*
Even as my chest swelled, a cool sense of reality returned.
Monthly interest: one percent.
Just by breathing, a hundred million won evaporated every month. Which meant I had no choice but to earn more than that — no, an overwhelming return.
I sat down at the computer and fired up the HTS.
The first ticker I pulled up in the buy window was Seokyung InfoComm.
*If my memory serves, within a month the government will designate satellite DMB as an IT growth engine.*
The moment the standard-setting and license-selection news broke, the related stocks would shoot for the ceiling without looking back. Seokyung InfoComm was the flagship play among them.
I placed the order without hesitation.
*Five billion won.*
Part of me wanted to burn all ten billion at once — the profit would have doubled. But I crushed the urge.
Throwing ten billion into a single name would send the price lurching. I could get caught up in rumors later about some third-generation chaebol heir trading on nonpublic information.
The portfolio had to be diversified — and dressed up in very plausible logic.
*All right, think. Early 2004... what shook Korea around this time?*
I started scrolling through news articles from the period. Not the front-page stuff, but the small, forgotten briefs people would skim past without a second glance.
Think. All I need is one small hint.
Then one line of text caught my eye.
"Wait — this one?"
I checked the article's date. It had run just yesterday.
The domestic press was still quiet. This was an era when even the phrase "avian influenza" sounded foreign, dismissed as nothing more than another tropical disease off in Southeast Asia.
But the year 2004 in my memory was different.
*Soon, the chickens are going to start dying by the millions.*
Around the Lunar New Year holiday, bird flu would make landfall in Korea's poultry farms. Chicken consumption would plummet, and the entire nation would tremble in fear.
And what rose in exchange?
*Quarantine — and substitutes.*
I immediately sorted through the related names.
PharmaBio — maker of animal vaccines and livestock sterilization equipment. A neglected stock with almost no trading volume.
*Three billion here.*
That left two billion.
*Well-being.*
The keyword that would define the mid-2000s. The craze for eating well and living well was just beginning to spread, and people were about to stop pinching pennies when it came to their health.
The harder China's factories ran, the murkier the skies over the peninsula grew. Add the yellow dust blowing in from China and the fine-dust scare on top of it—
*Air purifiers.*
The intersection that could ride both the yellow dust theme and the well-being theme at once.
I looked up CleanAir, the market leader in home air purifiers. Solid earnings, but still undervalued — the market simply hadn't noticed it yet.
*The remaining two billion goes there.*
I set the rest of the capital to be executed in staged buys on CleanAir.
Seokyung InfoComm, 50 percent.
PharmaBio, 30 percent.
CleanAir, 20 percent.
The portfolio was complete.
IT, biotech, environment. To anyone looking, it was a forward-looking, perfectly rational spread — when in truth it was nothing more than a straw stuck into a future already written.
"Whew..."
The order-fill alerts chimed one after another.
All ten billion won, committed to stocks without a single won to spare.
"The future had better not change."
Nothing had changed so far, but now that I'd thrown a fortune into the market, worry crept in ahead of everything else.
"Stay calm and wait. That's all I can do now."
A few days later.
Only the glow of my desk lamp lit the quiet room.
I was hunched over a math workbook, pen spinning between my fingers.
*I can't focus.*
My eyes were on the equations, but my mind was sprinting after the stock exchange in Yeouido and the flow of money through Myeongdong. With ten billion won sitting out there on the line, it would have been a lie to claim otherwise.
Still, I didn't put the pen down.
*I can't let my studies slip either.*
For a third-generation chaebol heir, credentials mean far more than a nameplate. They are proof of diligence — the most basic data point establishing one's competence.
The mercy of it was that in my previous life, I'd always been a decent student. The so-called model type. A personality that quietly did as it was told turned out to be remarkably well suited to studying.
"......."
I dredged up formulas buried in the far reaches of my memory and worked through the problems. The high-school-level material felt foreign at first after so long, but the instincts were coming back fast.
*Korea University's business school is merely the baseline.*
My goal was higher than that.
Not simply getting in — I needed a CSAT score so overwhelming it bordered on the top spot in the nation. Only then would the way everyone looked at me change.
I had to be seen not as some lucky kid who dabbled in stocks, but as a successor flawless from head to toe.
I was deep in a losing battle with a calculus problem when it happened.
*Bzzzt—*
The flip phone sitting at the corner of my desk gave a short shudder.
I set down the pen and picked it up. Flipping it open, the incoming message filled the screen.
The sender was Han Jae-yi.
The sentence had cut off in its urgency.
But I didn't need to read any further to know what came next.
*Here it comes.*
My heart slammed once, hard. Without a moment's delay I closed the workbook and turned on the monitor.
The sleeping screen brightened, and I double-clicked the familiar HTS icon. The few seconds of loading felt like an eternity.
The moment my watchlist appeared, my eyes flew to the very top — Seokyung InfoComm.
"...Ha."
A short gasp escaped me on its own.
Seokyung InfoComm: 12,450 ▲ 1,600 (+14.75%)
A pillar of red.
The chart was climbing vertically.
The bid window was stacked with millions of shares queued up to sweep up every scrap of supply, while the asking side had withered to nothing.
"It'll touch the daily limit soon."
The government had just formally selected the satellite DMB business as a next-generation growth industry and announced plans to push for early adoption, it seemed. At the Minister of Information and Communication's single utterance, the related stocks were erupting into pillars of flame all at once.
The stock I'd loaded five billion won into had made seven hundred fifty million in a single day.
And this was only the beginning.
I gazed at the blood-red screen and murmured, low and steady.
"Good."
The future hadn't changed, and my prediction had been right.
Now, the wave had begun.